Guys, it is literally just a small form factor PC (with a couple of console QoL additions like waking from controller support and HDMI CEC). It's an open platform.
If Valve sold it at a loss, offices and governments would buy them up and reimage them with Windows.
Sony and MS can only get away with making a loss because the closed platform guarantees they make money back on game sales.
Part of the reason the PS3 got more locked down after release is that governments, researchers, and companies openly talked about buying them and running custom software on it, because the hardware was so subsidised.
That said, this is a low end device for 2026, make no mistakes of that. If Valve want to, they can sell this for $500. Perhaps even lower if they're fine with razor thin margins.
Remember that this thing's price needs to be justifiable not only now, but also in 2 years or so when vastly more powerful consoles come out.
Because when humans see a robot with boobs, the comments turn into "hey this robot has tits", and when they don't, the comments turn into "humanity is going to be euthanised by the machines".
This legislation also looks at limiting ticket fees retailers can charge.
I'm sure people will complain because it won't be 100% effective and that therefore makes this useless, but that's daft, using that logic we shouldn't bother with any laws, as they can all be broken. We shouldn't just do nothing because a solution isn't flawless.
In the background, the CMA is also currently investigating Ticketmaster for their surge pricing shenanigans. Fingers crossed they rule in a way that puts people first (and if they don't, politicians update the law with surge pricing algorithms in mind).
I bought FH4 because I live very close to one of the castles there and have visited a handful of other places. It's genuinely very cool to see those places.
But so many other aspects of the game are really overwhelming. I do a race then there's crazy flashy animations, multiple progress bars going up in the background with strobe lights, my character doing some stupid Fortnite-like dance, then it makes me do multiple attempts at a slot machine mini game?
I look at the world map and there's literally thousands of things there, with no option to filter out stuff that you've already completed.
Maybe I'm getting old, but it felt like one of those mobile games that goes over the top with praise and animations to keep people's attention and keep them on a dopamine high.
I want that map, with a story where you start with a shit car, and work your way up to better cars by doing well in races. I don't want any of the flashy nonsense or the 500 online features (that don't exist anymore because MS shut down the servers - now it shows constant connection errors)
I have an Immich instance running on my home server that backs up my and my wife's photos. It's like an open source Google Photos.
One of its features is an local AI model that recognises faces and tags names on them, as well as doing stuff like recognising when a picture is of a landscape, food, etc.
Likewise, Firefox has a really good offline translation feature that runs locally and is open source.
AI doesn't have to be bad. Big tech and venture capital is just choosing to make it so.
I won't bash Mint, because I think Mint Cinnamon is great (if a little ugly out of the box).
For the past 3-4 years, though, I've been using Fedora and I've been very impressed. Almost as cutting edge as Arch, yet it's well-tested and in my experience rock-solid stable.
There's a strong tankie presence on this platform and on this community.
The idea that China, and oftentimes even Russia, do anything wrong is often met with scepticism and aggression.